Last spring we took down an old shed behind our rental house. As it turned out much of the wood in the shed was 1" sheathing from old Burlington box cars. I've saved some of the boards because the paint appears very well preserved.
The question I have is what is the best way of preserving these 60+ year old paint samples in the future?
Thanks, Jim
Cool dry place, breathably covered against dust and light.
What we do in the National Park Service Architectural Preservation Division is to sliver off small pieces of paint to include a layer of the substrate, in your case wood. These samples are then mounted in petrie dishes with parafin on the bottom. The petrie dishes are then placed in racks and stored on shellves in a dark room.
Keep in mind that these samples are fusually for the purpose of viewing layers of the paint history of a building and are viewed under high magnification so that a sample the size of sand will look like a rock. For your purposes I would think that any archival envelope would work for holding samples. All you need is the surface with the paint on it so you could rip off the back leaving a 1/4" thick sample that would fit better in most any storage system you select.
Jeff
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